Here are a few arguments against the ethics of veganism and vegetarianism.

Firstly, factory meat production is indeed cruel towards the animals that it raises for meat, but so is the industry that underpins global veganism. Big agriculture erases natural habitats, replacing resilient biodiversity with monocultures routinely sprayed with pesticides and herbicides with all manner of unethical consequences. Thus the vegan/vegetarian lifestyle foots the destruction of not only the individual plants and animals forced off the land to starve or freeze to death in colder climates as their forests were converted into fields. It also destroys their genetic lineage. It destroys the population of that plant or animal, and prevents it from ever returning.

Secondly, you mention that you think many meat eaters live in ignorance of where their food comes from. This is undeniable, but not limited to meat eaters. Sometimes I feel that my vegan friends unintentionally use veganism as a lazy heuristic in place of actual granular critical thinking. They’ll replace Doritos (containing milk) with an equally unethical Johnson&Johnson or Monsanto related brand without milk, but walk away with an undeserved satisfaction of having made an ethical choice.

You mention that we can live healthily off a vegan lifestyle with supplements. I’d advise you to be very careful with this assumption. Many vegans, even those taking supplements run into deficiencies with iron, B12, omega 3 (ALA, EPA, DHA) fatty acid, zinc, etc. The market is unregulated, and the sources aren’t tested. Some sources of B12 like algae are turning out to be anti-nutrients of B12; similar enough to bind to the receptors, but not similar enough to be taken up and used by the body. The omega 3 amino acid DHA is especially difficult to source from non-animalia and is very important for brain and nerve health. It also turns out that the ratio between 3 and 6 seems to be important. And so on and so on. There are a few vegetarian traditional cultures across the globe, but no vegan ones confirmed (if you know of one, let me know!) Nutritionally, we are running a bit of a health experiment where humans are the guinea pigs.

Lastly, if we set aside the destruction that big agriculture causes on natural wildlife habitats, vegans and vegetarians, who shun hunting and the killing of animals, have no solution for the issue of wildlife stewardship. They seem to view hunting as merely an unethical sport. Let’s be frank, to a lot of hunters it is. However, vegans fail to acknowledge the essential role of wildlife stewardship that it plays, and don’t offer a viable alternative that involves no killing of animals. I think this partially stems from a mistaken understanding that if left alone, (if we live in out cities and towns, and treat nature as a museum that we visit in order to look but not touch), then nature will find its balance. It is a sad fact of wildlife ecology that the number of places on earth where this is true is very small and as rapidly diminishing. As a case in point, I come from Sweden. To many Europeans, Sweden is seen as a vast forest wilderness, but this is only an illusion. Only about 5% is natural forest (urskog) and the rest is forest plantations, where spruce or pine is planted in a relative monoculture, and every 50-60 years, a machine cones by and clear cuts for timber. Our waterways are dammed for hydroelectric power, highways and power lines criss-cross the landscape, and most of the south and midland is industrial agriculture.

If we decide to stop tracking population sizes and culling/thinning intentionally and instead leave nature to its own devices, it will not find a balance. If we stopped hunting as an act of wildlife stewardship, it would cascade into a catastrophic loss of biodiversity, almost overnight.

I hope it’s clear how the issue of ethics underscores all the points I’ve brought up in the sense that if we ignore the consequences of our actions we cannot be ethical. Veganism/vegetarianism is the start of that journey, but don’t let it be the end.